“One key to creating opportunities in places like Rossendale and Darwen is reindustrialisation—making more things in more places, and creating good jobs close to home. To make this real, we need economic policy that truly understands the particular constraints facing our small towns and rural communities. We need to be connected, and to have a policy that works for all parts of the country, not just places with a mayor. That will require a truly ambitious industrial strategy that gets behind every business, and a Government fully committed to buying British. Will the Leader of the House agree to a debate in Government time on how we can make that happen?”
Spoke in 33 debatesAsked 5 questions1 APPG role
Healthcare
NHS Corridor Care
“I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Dr Allin-Khan) for securing this debate and all my esteemed colleagues for covering the issue so brilliantly and with such expertise. You will be glad to hear, Madam Deputy Speaker, that that allows me to be brief and to focus on Blackburn A&E. Blackburn A&E is one of the busiest in the country, serving east Lancashire. It has been one of the starkest examples of corridor care, and I could tell so many stories of constituents suffering the indignities and poor care that are the inevitable consequence of that. There is the 70-year-old lady with spinal cancer who was stuck there for 72 hours; the young woman who was a historical sexual assault victim, physically shaking with fear at being left in a corridor surrounded by men; or the 90-year-old with dementia and double incontinence, reliant on her daughter to change and clean her, and desperate for privacy, comfort and reassurance. I too have been there, unable to walk after a fall, for 13 hours overnight in a corridor that felt like a war zone, next to an old lady who was in constant pain, fearful and alone, crying out for her family—just one voice among many. Corridor care is at best undignified and at worst heartless, heartbreaking and cruel. Its normalisation is a scandal and is one of the starkest examples of a health system failed and broken by Tory austerity. We must end it, and I am pleased to say that in Blackburn we are finally seeing progress.”